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What is Academy?

As blockchain technology is exploding and more and more ICO’s are looking to incorporate it into their platforms, learning blockchain has become increasingly lucrative. That’s where Academy comes in. It is the first full-circle blockchain education solution and offers training and classes in a variety of relevant technologies that can earn the user money going forward.

The classes include their blockchain academy that retrains developers and transitions them to working within a blockchain ecosystem. Their coders academy is a comprehensive curriculum that trains coders within 12 months. Another class offers executive education that provides users with insights into how blockchain technology can impact industries across the world. The prices for the individual courses can vary, but users can pay for the courses using Academy Tokens or ACAD, which is on the Ethereum blockchain.

A roadmap on the website shows that in January 2016 Kingsland University – through which the courses are taught – gained accreditation. They established Academy – School of Blockchain in July 2017, then published their Whitepaper in December. In January 2018 they acquired SoftUni and have begun to accept and register students. The courses are set to begin in April and continue throughout the year.

How Does Academy Work?

The ICO begins by pointing out that the market for blockchain-related platforms and technology is exploding, pointing out that in 2017 $3.7 billion was raised to fund blockchain related projects compared to just $106 million in 2016. This trend is showing no signs of slowing down, but the only issue is that there simply aren’t enough blockchain developers to keep up with the demand of the market, pointing out that there are 14 open jobs for every blockchain engineer available.

By creating the first Academy for blockchain education, Academy is not only addressing the issue, but also providing users with first hand experience with tokens and cryptocurrency that is on the Ethereum blockchain. Courses will be paid for in tokens by students while businesses and corporations can use their tokens to look through and select available Academy-accredited graduates for their projects.

According to the company site, when a token is spent at the Academy, 70% of its value is automatically burned, while 15% will go to a scholarship fund, and the remaining 15% will go to a community development program that helps fund the Incubator Accelerator program, which gives start-ups access to the latest developments in blockchain technology.

Features and Benefits of Academy

The potential benefits for token-backing students, corporations, and people in general are detailed by the ICO. Student developers will receive priority course placement, a discount on their course fees, assistance with job placement, and gamified learning.

The corporations, businesses, and organizations that back the tokens will receive priority course placement for staff that needs to be trained, access to trained developers, and input as to how the curriculum should be shaped going forward so it is most effective using an advisory node system.

Those who purchase the tokens simply as investors they will be helping to ensure the future or blockchain by building an efficient, sustainable community, and can also support future blockchain projects through the Incubator Accelerator.

The Academy Token Sale

Academy has set their token sale to begin on March 1st, 2018 and have not yet designated an end date. Fortunately, it appears that there are no geographic limitations to participating in the sale. The tokens are known as ACAD and are distributed as ERC20. There will be 195,000,000 tokens created in total and 40% of those will be made available during the token sale.

A public pre-sale began on February 15th, with 1 ACAD being sold for $1.00. When the actual sale begins, the price will rise to $2.00 for 1 ACAD. The fundraising goal for the token sale is $50 million, though no numbers have been revealed yet regarding what the pre-sale has generated. The sale will accept ETH, BTC, LTC, and BCH as currency.

In terms of allocation the site provides a breakdown of how all the tokens are going to be distributed but no breakdown of how they plan to use the funds they raise. As mentioned 40% of the tokens will be made available as part of the token sale, 20% will go to operations and overhead, 15% are designated as team tokens, 10% will go to the incubator/accelerator, 5% to the user adoption bounties, 5% for technology development, and the last 5% will go into reserves.

Who’s Behind Academy?

The executive team for Academy is made up of seven members, each of who holds an important position with the company. The founder is John Souza, who is also the founder of the Kingsland Academy. The two co-founders are Jason King and Moe Levin. The Director of Global Business and Enterprise Development is Robert Kim. Additionally, there are three more executives that work for both Academy and SoftUni – or Software University.

The ICO is also advised by an extensive amount of people, broken up into separate advisory categories. The first are curriculum advisors, six in total, who are responsible for designing and developing a “world-class curriculum”. The next advisory group are the enterprise and business initiative advisors, which is three people with experience at twitter, snapchat, Instagram, and GoCoin.

The actual standard advisory board is comprised of twelve individuals including those with experience at companies such as Bitcoin, Crowdfunder, Emercoin Group, Facebook, VideoCoin, and more. There are also two legal advisors listed. Although several individuals are identified the information made available about them is scarce.

Conclusion

The ICO makes a persuasive argument regarding its importance by providing statistics that clearly demonstrate the incredible rise of blockchain technology within the past year, and the need for developers who can handle the numerous blockchain related projects starting seemingly every day. If the numbers it provides are accurate then there would certainly be a substantial incentive for both developers and corporations to get involved in the token sale.

That said, there does not seem to be enough incentive to attract general investors and their arguments regarding the benefit the ICO can have on everyone is vague. Currently only live classes are being held with online courses being planned to begin in the third quarter of 2018. How successful the token sale – which is asking for a substantial amount in $50 million – and the first round of classes are will go a long way to determining the ICOs viability. We are concerned that there was no breakdown of the intended use of the funds raised, particularly given the amount of money they are seeking.

This seems like a concept that will come together in some form or another eventually, but we do not know if Academy is taking the right approach.

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Peter Lehmann

Peter is a blockchain investor and cryptocurrency writer at Vkool.com. Since 2014 Peter has advised blockchain startups and ICOs on content marketing, strategy and business development.

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